SEEK Limited (SEK) announced that it has acquired a 40% interest in Online Career Center Mexico SA de CV (OCC), the leading employment website in Mexico. SEEK will pay $US40m for its stake in OCC. SEEK will take 2 of 5 board seats and will play an active role in driving the strategic and growth agenda.
According to Jason Lenga, SEEK’s Director of Corporate Strategy: “SEEK has continued to look for opportunities to expand its international footprint in attractive markets, following on from our investments in China, Brazil and South East Asia. Mexico is the 11th largest country in terms of population and 13th in terms of GDP. With both internet penetration and online advertising growing rapidly, the online employment classifieds market is expected to enjoy significant growth over many years. “
“OCC has built a commanding leadership position in the Mexican online employment market and has an excellent management team who we look forward to working with. OCC’s historical financial performance is impressive, with high margins and strong free cash flow generation.” “We are pleased to be further building our relationship with Tiger Global Management, who will remain the majority shareholder in OCC. Tiger has been a very successful investor in the online space, and we have developed a great working relationship with them through our joint investment in Brazil.” Mr Lenga said.
SEEK has funded the investment via its $250m bank debt facility and will equity account for the investment as an Associate. SEEK expects the investment to be marginally earnings per share positive in FY11 on a cash basis and is confident it will be significantly accretive in the longer term.
SEEK enjoys a formidable lead over its nearest competitors in Australia & New Zealand in terms of both job ad and jobseeker numbers. In Australia, seek.com.au hosts approximately 60% of all jobs on Australia’s major job sites. In a given month, over 130,000 job advertisements are posted on seek.com.au with 3.89* million unique browsers visiting the site. In New Zealand, over 12,000 job ads are now posted on seek.co.nz, significantly more than that of its nearest competitors.
Occ.com.mx is the leader in the online employment market in Mexico. OCC has more than 85,000 jobs listed on site at any point in time, ~85% share among major competitors and attracts more than 3m Unique Browsers each month, significantly higher than its nearest competitor.
http://www.traderdealer.com.au/Fundamentals/sek
Tags: New acquisition, Online Jobs, Seek Limited, SEK
